The present invention relates to communication networking, and more specifically, to a method, system, and computer program product for providing community-defined and managed communication networking services.
Networking sites such as Facebook®, LinkedIn®, and Match.com® provide the ability for individuals to associate and/or collaborate with other individuals over a network. These, and other, networking sites typically target a community of users who share some common purpose (e.g., business/professional, social, goal-oriented—such as eDiets.com®, etc.). In particular, networking sites commonly target a limited population and require users to define themselves through a restricted and pre-disposed set of attributes using a pre-defined profile template. For example, Facebook® is primarily targeted to a young, college-aged market. This is evident when considering the profile templates provided for users who wish to register for the site. In particular, the template profile contains pre-defined attribute fields, which prompt each newly registered user to identify a school in which the user is currently, or was previously, affiliated. Registered users can then search for, and interact with, other students who may attend the same school or who are living in the same geographic area of the school. While these profiles do not limit users' interactions to others who attend the same school, there is clearly a significant focus on establishing a community of college-aged students for the purpose of social networking (e.g., other pre-defined attributes that exemplify the interests of young, college-aged students include information, such as age, music preferences, nightlife, etc.). Accordingly, the profile template provided by the site is designed to cater to this demographic. Likewise, a professional networking site may establish a profile template that prompts a user to enter job-oriented information, such as employer, career type, professional affiliations, and acquired skills. Interactions among users of the professional networking site are typically (and primarily) business-oriented, as compared to the personal, or social interactions of a social networking site.
One of the drawbacks to these existing networking sites is that a user may be required to register for, and maintain, multiple different profiles, each of which satisfy the needs of the user with respect to the specific purpose or objectives of each of the individual sites. Maintaining multiple profiles can be a time-consuming effort for the user, since the user would need to maintain separate user accounts/password information for each site, as well as update information for each site as the situation warrants.
What is needed, therefore, is an extended networking system that enables users to define themselves and their community of users, such that a single profile can be implemented and maintained by each user for the purpose of serving any type of objective (e.g., personal, social, professional, goal-oriented, etc.), and whereby the community of users maintains control of the management of the extended network.